


Oscitant

by cognomen



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/F, Femslash, angry lady sex, bossy Alana
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 11:05:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2267391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of all of them, she has no idea how they’d dragged Ms. Lounds into the plan. She isn’t certain what the woman could have been offered - likely all the stories she could write on any of the people involved once she was revealed safe, sound, and alive.</p>
<p>Alana kicks off the blankets with a frustrated noise, agitated, willing her thoughts to settle enough for sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oscitant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



She closes her eyes tight in the darkness and wills herself _sleep, sleep, sleep,_ trying to keep the mantra up enough to shut out her thoughts. Instead they race and leap like trout up a stream, hurtling themselves unruly into her awareness and struggling against her attempts to pin them flat.

Foremost is anger - anger at the lure, at the plan of entrapment. At not one by three people dragged down into this ludicrous plan. She has some idea why Will believes so strongly, he has convinced himself he knows the answer to the mystery of Hannibal.

He has convinced himself that the answer is in blood, that the killer he was having so much trouble finding was someone close to him.

Despite all that, he couldn’t let it be, and Alana is aware of the irony, here. She sits awake, tossing herself over onto her front, dragging a pillow closer.

Of all of them, she has no idea how they’d dragged Ms. Lounds into the plan. She isn’t certain what the woman could have been offered - likely all the stories she could write on any of the people involved once she was revealed safe, sound, and alive.

Alana kicks off the blankets with a frustrated noise, agitated, willing her thoughts to settle enough for sleep. 

Hannibal was safe.

They were _wrong_.

Sitting up thinking about it was not going to do Alana any good.

Nor had logic gotten her to sleep and no amount of thinking around in circles was promising to get her there, either.

Alana makes a violent motion to get out of bed, flinging the covers back with a sigh and looking at the mess she’s kicked in them. She makes a vague attempt to right it, still agitated.

She is halfway through brushing her hair, glaring tiredly into the mirror at her own angry countenance when she realizes she’s not quite sure what she’s doing. 

There is a vague plan in her to go somewhere, challenge someone, for all the good it will do. She cannot talk sense into Jack - he had pulled rank on her earlier when she’d tried. 

She is too angry to try with Will.

Yet the electric energy to go is in her,and she doesn’t have enough logic left in her exhausted mind to stop her own impetus. She dresses quickly before she can talk herself out of it again. And she discovers, with her hands on the wheel, that it feels better.

She is still angry, but her thoughts are quieter. A low buzz while she focuses on the roads, on finding her way back to someplace she’d only been once. 

Alana has always prided herself on her sense of direction. Still, she’s only mostly sure she has the right old house in the Baltimore suburbs. There’s a light on inside, one beacon against the two a.m. darkness that leaves Alana convinced it is right. She’s right. Someone inside is sitting up inside and thinking regretful thoughts.

Good.

It isn’t wholly certain that she had intended to make anything of her trip out here. In the back of her mind, Alana is certain she only meant to drive off the pent up anger.

It had helped. Really. She was better now, ready to go home and face the repeat of the whole incident. Just her and her bed, and a tangle of sheets.

She slams her car door, heedless of the rest of the neighborhood, and stomps up the wooden stairs in her flats, shivering in the night air - she had not remembered a coat, had not anticipated needing one. She winds up to bang on the door. 

Maybe Ms. Lounds deserved a good scare. Maybe it would render her sensible.

Instead, the door swings open before Alana can start hitting it. Freddie Lounds looks frail and vulnerable in an oversized cotton bathrobe, her eye makeup just smudged a little. She holds her arms against herself and keeps her chin tipped up, defiant of her own fear. 

For a moment, Alana hates Jack more for leaving her alone out here.

“I would say it’s nice to see a friendly face,” Freddie starts with a weak attempt at a joke, though it works well enough to break the tension of the silence. “But I guess I should ask if you’re friendly, first.”

Alana isn’t sure she is. She feels slightly less ready to murder Ms. Lounds herself, but she isn’t ready to forgive this either. 

“I’m not,” she allows. “But I’m not your biggest threat anyway, given the games you’re playing.”

Freddie sighs, twisting her features into an expression of self-directed humor.

“I’ve gotten so many more lectures from Will Graham’s acquaintances,” she says, with a false and brittle brightness. “When he’s the one who’s the teacher, or so I hear.”

Alana stares at her, uncertain how the whole picture comes together to make Freddie. She was, apparently, human - and _not_ a lizard, despite Alana’s first impressions. She had her own insecurities and self-doubts. Yet, she could tear down others publicly to do nothing more than make her wages.

“Lecture me inside, I guess,” Freddie suggests, slyly, holding the door open to admit Alana. 

“Coffee or tea?” Freddie asks, once Alana has committed herself to entering the safehouse and enduring Ms. Lound’s company, at least long enough to ask the questions that had kept her up long enough to bring her here.

For a moment, Alana experiences a brief shock of irreality. It was nearing three thirty in the morning and she had driven here in the depths of desperation to confront Freddie. The reality was, now she was here. When her anger burned out, she would have to get herself home again.

“Why are you doing this?” Alana finds herself demanding, perhaps as much of herself as Freddie.

“My momma taught me all about hospitality?” Freddie jokes, leading Alana into the kitchen.

She sets a kettle on the stove, heating water even though Alana hadn’t answered her question.

“Trying to set up Dr. Lecter,” Alana corrects, unwilling to let go of her point. Even though it doesn’t matter - not the whys. Will was a man possessed, and Hannibal driven enough by a need to _know_ Will and save him that they were both diving equally deep into danger to accomplish their goals. 

Freddie rolls one shoulder, and gives a frail smile.

“I wanted to see how far Will Graham would go,” she says. “How far Jack Crawford is going to let him.”

She turns then, fetching down a box of cheap tea from the cabinet - she has to go up onto tiptoes to get it. Two mugs follow, white sterile things with no personality, and that seems even more out of place.

Freddie Lounds is a witty coffee cup kind of girl.

“And you’ll get a story out of it,” Alana accuses.

“Well,” Freddie agrees, placing tea bags in each cup, “Never do anything for nothing.”

She looks up sharply at Alana.

“Isn’t that what you get out of _your_ profession too? A great story, or _study_ as you choose to call it - for the medical journals?”

Alana’s anger sparks up suddenly, ineffectively.

“The only real difference is what I write is accessible.”

The kettle whistles shrilly and Freddie retrieves it with a pot holder curled around her fingers, pouring for both of them.

“The _difference_ is,” Alana begins, her tone gone high and angry. “That I tell the _truth_ to help people who might be experiencing the same thing.”

Freddie presses the mug into Alana’s hands, weathering her angry glare. It’s that which makes Alana realize how precarious and ridiculous her insistence on the moral high ground at this hour of the night - or morning - is. The cup is warm and comforting in her hands.

Freddie watches the thought form on Alana’s features, her own intensely interested.

Alana jams the cup of tea against her own mouth hard enough to make her teeth hurt, buying time to find her reason. She counts to five with the weak taste of chamomile on her tongue.

“What am I doing,” Freddie says, finally, accepting Alana’s self-placating for what it is, “Is surviving.”

Alana suppresses another outburst. Shes’ tired, and outrage is getting her nowhere, least of all back home.

“When Will Graham and Jack Crawford come to your door and say they want to kill you, they either mean it or you just play along.”

Freddie phrases it like a bad joke, and Alana wonders how much of it is for her benefit, and how much is for Freddie’s own.

“Worst case scenario, I appease a couple of guys who are _way_ too obsessed with doing this, with or without my help,” she continues, tapping her pretty nails gently against her mug. 

“And best case? I’m already on your boyfriend’s bad side. If it turns out he is killing people and eating them, how far down on the list can I really be?”

“He’s not-”

“I honestly hope he isn’t,” Freddie agrees. “After all this, it’d be great to laugh it up and have a nice, easy piece for Tattlecrime about how the FBI is off the deep end.”

“My boyfriend,” Alana finishes, unsure why the distinction should really bother her.

Freddie tilts her head as if in utter shock, and Alana feels vaguely ashamed of herself, somewhere in her proper upbringing. The little girl who had once gone to Sunday school and danced ‘leaving room for Jesus’ would be shocked and perhaps ashamed.

She has not felt like that girl for a very long time.

Freddie looks surprised by the information, by the correction to her offhand statement.

“But it’s not over,” she guesses aloud. “Or you’d have said ‘he’s not my boyfriend _anymore_ ”

Alana doesn’t give her the satisfaction of any further answer. Freddie’s nails work in a spider like motion against her cup, thoughtful.

“Interesting,” she purrs. 

Alana doesn’t think so. At least, not in the way Freddie thinks it is.

“Anyway,” Freddie continues, “They were going to try with or without me. I just provided a convenient - and endangered if what they say is true - target.”

Alana takes a long sip of tea, draining the cup.

“I’m glad you had enough time alone to think up a good excuse,” Alana says. “Do _you_ buy it?”

“I never buy what I’m selling,” Freddie answers, her smile infuriatingly self-satisfied. 

Alana sets her cup firmly enough on the counter that it makes a hollow sound, then runs out of steam for her anger.

She isn’t sure what she thought she would accomplish here, why she had come at all except that she had been awake anyway, that there had been some vague promise of catharsis built up in her own mind. 

Ultimately, all she had done was to frustrate herself further. 

“Do you wanna crash on the couch?” Freddie asks at last, when they both realize they’re just standing in the kitchen, quiet and almost civil.

“It’s pretty comfortable.”

“I should-”

“Do you want to crash in the _bed_?” Freddie insists, turning it into a proposition even as she raises her voice over Alana’s protest.

It works to stop Alana’s words, but not the glare she feels forming on her features.

Freddie smiles winningly, trying her best to charm - and it slowly withers to a pout when Alana does not falter.

“Do you ever smile?”

“These days?” Alana admits, “Not often.”

“Yeah,” Freddie answers, agreeably. “Me neither.”

“I should-”

This time, Freddie stops her with a kiss, curling her hands at Alana’s waist to hold on through the first shove.

“Stay,” Freddie begs, leaning her body into Alana’s invitingly.

“You said he wasn’t your boyfriend,” Freddie purrs as Alana leans away, “Means no one can get mad.”

“You’ve just made _me_ mad,” Alana tells her, sinking her nails into the backs of Freddie’s arms to convince her to let go.

“Have I?” Freddie asks, coyly. “I thought you were already mad. Tell me exactly how mad you are.”

Alana shoves her for that, and Freddie leans into it, as if ready for more. 

“Not funny,” Alana tells her.

“Say ‘no’ and I’ll stop.”

Instead, Alana shoves her back, angry, and suddenly finding an outlet for it. Freddie welcomes it, absorbing the her anger with a purr as Alana pushes her against the counter.

She is determined to turn Freddie’s own challenge against her, determined to call her fluff - whatever purpose it served - and make her be the one to cry stop.

Somewhere between kissing and grappling each other, she realizes her plan is a bad one. They push the cups into the sink with a crash as Freddie lifts herself onto the counter, heaving in a quick motion that moves their bodies together suggestively. She slings her legs around Alana’s waist and pulls her close.

Alana forgets her purpose pretty quickly in favor of the clever fingers cupping her breasts, tracing the delicate lace edging on her bra, sliding just beneath the hard underwires to trace against her ribs before Freddie reaches to undo the hooks at the back of Alana’s bra, her tongue moving just a little against her lower lip in concentration.

It is oddly endearing.

Freddie’s hands are still warm from her cup of tea when she eases them up under Alana’s shirt, teasing against her belly and then beneath the loosened bra as Alana lets her. 

There had been a point where she would have been able to logic herself out of this, a point when both could have drawn back and laughed it off as nerves. They had flown past, skipped over it as a stone over the tense surface of the water, in favor of assuaging their nerves another way 

So Alana reaches to pull Freddie’s shirt over her head and lifts her own arms when Freddie does the same. Soft bodies lean together, skin on skin, and it is comforting, soft, sweet in a strange way. There are few scars on Freddie’s body, but her eyes bear the wound of weakness, some faint fear that one of them would think better of this and abandon it. 

Freddie pushes her back just a little, licking Alana’s lower lip in affectionate challenge before they part.

“You’re sure Hannibal feels the same way about not being your boyfriend?” she asks, tracing the edge of her nail playfully - gently - against one of Alana’s nipples playfully until the flesh goes hard and resistant. 

Alana shakes her head, and then a sly answer occurs to her and she is mad enough to give it voice.

“I’m sure?” she answers, returning the favor of undoing Freddie’s bra - which is pristine white and simple in a way that’s charming. “Have you seen the way he looks at Will Graham?”

Freddie laughs, and it’s a genuine sound, suggesting she has seen exactly what Alana is talking about.

“Let’s move,” she suggests, sliding down off the counter, eyeing the broken cups in the sink.

She leads the way to the safe house bedroom, pausing in the doorway to twist out of her pants with an athletic, attractive shimmy.

She is trim and lovely, Alana observes, her skin pale and freckled beneath the curtain of her hair. Alana lets eyes follow Freddie’s curves, feeling like a college freshman again.

“I haven’t done this since Sunday study sleepovers,” Alana admits, shifting to take off her own pants, joining Freddie when the other bounces to a rest on the bed.

“That sounds fantastically naughty,” Freddie observes.

“And that’s all you’ll hear about it,” Alana asserts. “I’m not going to give you anything else that won’t also implicate you.”

“Oh, _implicate_ me,” Freddie purrs. “Not even if I say please?”

“Say it a few times,” Alana offers, reaching out to pull Freddie against her, body to body until their curves find a comfortable way to settle together, with one of Alana’s knees between Freddie’s thighs. “Find out where it gets you.”

“Please,” Freddie begs as they make soft shapes against each other with wandering hands, and Alana touches lightly over her thighs, fixing her mouth at Freddie’s pulse point. Her skin tastes a little like salt and smells like faded perfume, something sweet but not flowery, like chocolate.

“Please,” she breathes, slipping her own fingers to the crux of Alana’s legs. She twists them in a long, curving coax that wakes a line of lust all the way down Alana’s spine, fire hot and ready faster than she would have expected. She can feel it to her depths, a contraction of muscles as Freddie repeats the motion and Alana catches her breath between her teeth with a click and a hiss like a snake.

For a time, they explore each other and whatever they were talking about fades behind quick breaths, behind Alana finding Freddie slick and ready to her touch, achingly aroused. 

Alana gets the third please - and she notes it, counting them like trophies - with her tongue a she works it between Freddie’s folds in a slow, sweet motion against her clit. 

Freddie clutches nails against Alana’s scalp encouragingly, hissing her pleas in a broken, sweet tone. 

Alana gives her what she asks for and feels her squirm, slowly winding tension in her belly and thighs, her own hand tucked down under her body to work fingertips against herself teasingly in time. 

She isn’t certain how she’d gotten most of the work. Perhaps because, as usual, she had taken it all on herself by commanding the situation.

Freddie whimpers - curling into the force of her oncoming orgasm, and Alana decides she’s okay with taking on the lion’s share - at least for the first turn.

She slides two fingers into Freddie’s cunt, curling them up to feel the soaking, bumpy flesh inside as Freddie shivers and contracts through it, feeling every twitch.

It leaves Freddie slippery, loose and sensitive and Alana keeps stroking until Freddie shifts away, catching her breath. 

“Study group, you said?” Freddie’s voice is high and giddy.

“Shh,” Alana answers, lifting herself over Freddie to ease against her.

They settle comfortably together, but Freddie doesn’t forget herself even with her heartbeat racing and her breath quick. She hikes her thigh up between Alana’s thighs and lends her enough pressure for friction.

“So you and Dr. Lecter are just comparing notes?” Freddie continues, voice husky.

“Don’t push it, Lounds,” Alana tells her, friction warming her nerves awake pleasantly. She doesn’t want to be mad, not right now. 

Freddie laughs in a good-spirited way, and works her fingers in between them to make lazy, circular swipes at Alana’s clit, watching every response through lowered eyelashes.

Alana tries not to take charge of this, to let it happen at her own pace. She tries not to think of Hannibal’s low voice asking her, husky and rough with exertion, why she was always in such a rush. It doesn’t take long before she’s driving for it, grinding herself harder into Freddie’s touch when it finds exactly the right place. She shifts her hips demandingly when it is.

Release builds slowly, and Alana tries to rush it - finds that she wants it, a tangible and sudden release of tension.

With little regard for any thoughts Freddie might have of taking her time, Alana rides herself to completion, and when she comes back, she finds her hand at Freddie’s wrist to hold her where Alana wanted her.

Freddie smiles in gentle amusement, shifting on the bed to leave Alana room to settle comfortably.

“Hey,” she says, catching Alana’s attention from the spicy, heavy sex smell in the air. 

“I’m not sure why you came up,” Freddie admits, and then reaches out to brush Alana’s hair back from her cheek where strands are stuck with sweat.

The gesture is soothing, as if she’s not sure of the result her words will have.

“But I’m glad you did. It’s lonely out here. And - scary. A little,” she admits.

It’s a little, tiny sign of humanity, and Alana has seen enough of them this evening to believe that perhaps, Freddie is actually human.

-

It is that humanity that reaches forward to her later, after the world has imploded.

Her nurse talks about it, sometimes, an avid Tattlecrime reader.

Alana keeps her eyes closed to, her ears blocked, until she’s on her feet again. Until physical therapy drains all of her stubbornness from her.

But for all the lurid details, for all the personal touches Freddie details, down to the patterns on Hannibal’s china. All of that, and she does not once mention Alana, perhaps as a return favor for company kept when they were both small and human and scared.

-The End.


End file.
